When was the last time you tried to be subtle? Can’t remember. Or tried to blend in with the crowd? Not likely. How about turn your conscious self off and become someone completely different? In an age of accountability, Lauren De’Ath personally dons the trench and dark glasses and goes undercover to decipher the undecipherable- the world of espionage.
In a world where we are all accessible via a mere click of a button or at the end of a phoneline, ambiguity could prove immensely liberating, I figure. My pre-teen memories are dominated by a little-known BBC try-spy programme, where average members of the public were sent to a secret MI6 camp (in a concealed booth just outside Liverpool Street Station) and put through their paces in a series of heart-stopping tests. Could Barbara go up to that stranger and manage to get an invite into their house? Would Darren ever be able to break into his son’s school and plant hidden cameras in his desk? They could melt impressively into the background like water, so fuelled by wannabe spy transparency, I began what I imagined was my own training programme... My mission, if I chose to accept it, was to trick even my own mother into believing I was someone else.
And so accepted and raring to go, my mission begins...
The lure of a career in secret intelligence is not just isolated to me. Many a childhood has been infiltrated by, at least on one occasion, the desire to go covert. Indeed there are few boys (and grown men for that matter) who have never yearned for the double-0 status, a gadget armoury to die for and of course the pick of beautiful women. And, conversely, what girl has never secretly wished she had the body of Ursula Andress and the ability to bed any man in ten languages? The spy lifestyle, no matter how perilous or lethal is one that has fired many an imagination. To date there have been over 175 movies on the subject, are some ninety-six spy fiction novelists alone, making it the second most published genre after romance and the illustrious James Bond tuxedo remains one of the most iconic costumes of all time.
Meanwhile, recent genre revamps, such as Horowitz’ ineffable Alex Rider and the BBC’s M.I. High, whilst cashing in on highly lucrative franchises, have introduced a whole new generation to the murky yet distinctly glamorous underbelly of espionage.
“Fictional spies appeal to our fantasy selves,” explains Professor James Chapman, a cultural historian of University of Leicester, who as well as being hooked on Bond since age eight, has written extensively on the subject. “Spies offer us an alternate identity, another self, who will of course be smarter, braver and sexier than our real selves. They therefore have something in common with the superhero, [but] of course “The Spy” is a more realistic fantasy.”
The creation of Spy Academy in Buckinghamshire by a mysterious unnamed former SAS offers a real life taste of the Bourne Identity. Associate Dave Newman, an experienced surveillance officer (and an alias name of all things) comments,” People hear of this very exciting lifestyle that takes them all over the world. There’s been a lot of books and cartoons released recently that have encouraged a lot of children to become interested. Of course, it sounds very glamorous so we take the exciting bits out of the surveillance industry and translated that into Spy Games.” In the first quarter of 2010 alone, they saw a “ballistic” two hundred percent increase in sales proving that being Bond means big money.
Back at the aptly named “Mission Mum”, my first port of call is to the MI6 website. The media section provides me with my first real-life spy simulation- I have to memorise a series of nondescript information about the altogether nondescript Stephanie Johnson who is travelling to a nondescript fictional country and then answer a series of questions. Of course, my interrogators throw in some red-herrings along the way: ‘What is the name of my third eldest brother?’ Pfft, amateurs. Stephanie only has two sisters.
The key to being a good spy lies in adaptability, resilience and an aptitude for critical thinking. Putting behind me the fact I got an E in my A Level Critical exam, I press onwards. “It’s all down to intelligence” explains Dave, who, as I spoke on the phone, was busy preparing a hostage recovery. “In a lot of what you do, the most important thing is often the weeks and weeks of pre-planning. Stake outs can last up to two or three weeks before you stop the target.” Being compromised is not an option. He continues: “Think smart, think covert and be prepared to change what you are doing very quickly.” Baring all of this in mind, I begin to pre-plan for Mission Mum. I contact my M, one Sophie Killingback for a full make-over. “I don’t want to look like myself,” I brief and armed with Mac make-up, off she goes. In just under an hour I am transformed and cannot help but wonder: is this how it works in the industry? Who out there on the streets of London is really themselves?
The world of MI6 and its domestic counterpart MI5 is one famously shrouded in secrecy and although answerable to government much of their work is still kept largely under wraps. Indeed, post 9/11 the UK’s secret service recruits are equal to that of the Cold War and rather against the Recessive grain, they are still employing. Whispers of the hiring process send shivers down my spine: a tap on the shoulder of an Oxbridge graduate; some Hooray Henry with a degree in a tropical language and they’re bags are packed, planes ready and off they go.
MI6’s online statement ominously tells me that they not only have ‘Operatives’ actively stationed around the UK, but on a global level also. The surprising openness of their online presence is in true spy style, I fear, misleading. Having come under fire in the past few years for gagging press over a number of “unspeakable” issues, including the controversial Extraordinary Rendition episodes and a supposed million dollar pay-off to their very own ‘Dr. No’, Osama Bin Laden, I can understand why the SIS would want to shake a very shady reputation.
“Oh, it was all boring!” says Denise Chisholm. Pardon? “We spent the whole day looking for files, putting them in envelopes and sticking pieces of paper on the front. It was of real importance regarding our countries’ security but it was mind numbing. When I realised that this was all there was to MI5, I had to get out.” Disheartened I press for stories of speedboat shoot-outs in the back streets of Venice, however it would seem the most exciting thing about a job at MI5, bar a bomb going off at The Hilton down the road, was the Secrecy Act she had to sign that required her name to be altered in this article. Even so, the incomprehensibility of British Intelligence continues to ring true: there is no contact telephone number, nor email address. Just a rough PO BOX number for letters to SE1.
It is the night before Mission Mum and my plans for a rendezvous at 1615 hours the next day have hit a spot of bother after a suspicious mother asks, “Why do you want meet anyway?” and forgetting 00Dave’s Number One tip- to think critically on your feet- I reply, “...It’s a secret.”
Changing identities is all down to the fine details. I opt for a plastic carrier rather than my black PVC holdall and remove day-to-day jewellery, but out in the real world my disguise has stumbled at the first hurdle- when even the guy in the canteen recognises me! “Is that your real hair? You were beautiful but now you are ugly.” Shaking off my past life is proving a challenge. When a man you rarely see recognises you, how do you trick your own mother? Back on the street, however, I am pleasantly surprised- people are ignoring me. I am incognito for the first ever. Blonde hair tucked away under a greying curly wig, I am a nobody. I am free.
As the hour of rendezvous rapidly approaches I brush all concerns away and from a distance survey my target’s exit.
1613: No sign.
1614: The disjointed clop of a sling-back.
1615: It is her.
She sees me five times as she looks up and down the street, but doesn’t clock, until an aghast face and: “Lauren, get to a Boots now. You look like a transvestite Mormon!” I guess there are just some missions that are out and out impossible. And mothers are one of them.
Mission accomplished.
-Bucket List magazine, June 2010
Monday, 31 January 2011
In My Lover's Lies
Was there ever such a subject that has had the capacity to fascinate, consume and divide, as love? It has been the centrifugal subject for art, music and literature since the first man had his heart broken by the eponymous hominid, “Lucy”. A few million years later, in the ten years it took for Carrie to marry Big, I had grown breasts and been subsequently loved and left by at least five boys. Alas, the path to true love is never smooth but after all the troubles and toils of romance, what can we expect to find at the end of it; in short, asks Lauren De’Ath does love exist?
At this very moment, over 75% of the world’s population believe themselves to be heart-wrenchingly, romantically, deeply, painfully in love. Fact. Via such romantic institutions as Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Cathy and erm, Jack and Rose, it is something of a bizarre entrenched truth that a life without true love is indeed our own end.
Bombarded with amorous pop songs, books and movies we are conditioned to believe that It is at the heart of everything, the moral of the story, all around and lifts us up where we belong; yes, sang Sir Paul, all you need is love... I shall stop with the idioms, I have a feeling some of you are feeling nauseous. “Love sucks,” my friend ventures. “End of.” Better? But it does seem as though the twenty-first century has gone love crazy: romance novels are the most popular genre in the world, online dating site match.com has some 15million users worldwide and even Paris Hilton wanted to ‘settle down’ (for a while, anyway). As human nature would have it, we all like to imagine that our passions in life are lead from the heart, but Love’s big problem however can be likened to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow- it just does not exist as the spontaneous, mysterious, destructive emotion outside of our wistful imaginations.
As any obliging scientist will tell you, unsurprisingly there is no part of our brain called The Love Lobe, rather through a rather more methodical cocktail of chemicals our brain entices us to fall in love for reproductive means. As writer W. Somerset Maugham writes in 1949, love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species- ouch and indeed I stumbled across a successful experiment online that broke Love down into three simple scientific steps (two of their three participating couples went on to get married).
The science of love goes as thus, when Juliet felt that rush of stabbing love the first time she saw Romeo across the crowded room of the Capulet ballroom, it was no doubt down to a chemical kinsmen named Dopamine, working in the same way as cocaine, it releases a pleasure endorphin triggered by the sight of your beloved. Come Act 3, Serotonin creeps in and in the same way as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, makes it nie on impossible to think of anything or anyone but that person. “O Romeo, Romeo, where for art thou Romeo?” By Act 5 the release of Vasopressin during Act 4, a bonding hormone following sex, is entirely pointless as the star cross’d lover’s destiny has been tragically cut short.
Critics of the famed Shakespearean play have condemned the greatest love story of all time as something of a quixotic fraud. Norman Holland, erstwhile critic and Shakespearean devotee claims the story is “nothing more than Romeo’s own wish-fulfilling fantasy.” Indeed, I have vivid recollections of my own Literature teacher slamming the supposed amorous intentions of the play with damning realism, demeaning Romeo as a randy vagabond dallying with a relative minor in the nonplussed twelve year old that is Juliet. “Now is this love?” he called to a rather despondent class. As much as we just adore falling into the pages of a love-story, continues Holland, we shouldn’t expect to find similar breath-taking romances in the real world. “We have to acknowledge that a dramatic character is not like a human being with the same mental processes as its author,” he says.
Western culture has a romanticised view of relationships hence our doleful remarks at the almost business-like way in which our Islamic counterparts are ‘arranged’ their marriage, following the age-old reasoning: ‘But what about love?’ According to the LoveGeist report 95% of the singletons want a relationship, but significantly fewer desire marriage. Has romanticised culturalism led to a generation seeking romance and love rather than long-term commitment? Argues Dr. Helen Fisher, world-renowned New York based biological anthropologist, “Culture sculpts these feelings of love- it gives us energy; makes us feel optimistic, elated, enthusiastic. Why not romance? What Hollywood is doing is merely piggybacking a uniting force that has been around for millions of years; it is impossible for any one person not to feel ‘love’. Legal statements aside romance and love are animal instincts and what people want are exciting relationships, something marriage supposedly contravenes.”
But here is where our argument comes unstuck because whilst we have cultural proof of our own love of love and so enamoured are we with the very idea of love, to admit so is seen as some kind of social blip. To admit to liking someone is seen as soppy and effeminate and the ‘I Love You’ of our grandparents’ generation have been replaced with no-strings casual sex; a rose with a Facebook Poke and The King and I with Heidi and Spender Pratt. There does seem a contradiction in the cultural myth that we do indeed love to love. Is the L-word on the decline, destined to die out on the waves of the digital age?
Continues Helen, “Contrary to belief, romantic love is very primitive; we have proof of love poetry from Ancient Greeks, China, Rome, it has transcended time because it is an instinctive brain system that has lasted and will continue to last for millions of years. We need to feel a certain romance to focus on the mating process, without it you would never be able to dedicate your time to another human being.”
So, is love the great cultural myth of our time, a science promoted to some social obligation? In the words of my grandmother, “All I know is, I’ve been in love with my husband for fifty long years and science or no science that’s all that counts.”
Yeah, I know, just call me Carrie Bradshaw.
At this very moment, over 75% of the world’s population believe themselves to be heart-wrenchingly, romantically, deeply, painfully in love. Fact. Via such romantic institutions as Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Cathy and erm, Jack and Rose, it is something of a bizarre entrenched truth that a life without true love is indeed our own end.
Bombarded with amorous pop songs, books and movies we are conditioned to believe that It is at the heart of everything, the moral of the story, all around and lifts us up where we belong; yes, sang Sir Paul, all you need is love... I shall stop with the idioms, I have a feeling some of you are feeling nauseous. “Love sucks,” my friend ventures. “End of.” Better? But it does seem as though the twenty-first century has gone love crazy: romance novels are the most popular genre in the world, online dating site match.com has some 15million users worldwide and even Paris Hilton wanted to ‘settle down’ (for a while, anyway). As human nature would have it, we all like to imagine that our passions in life are lead from the heart, but Love’s big problem however can be likened to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow- it just does not exist as the spontaneous, mysterious, destructive emotion outside of our wistful imaginations.
As any obliging scientist will tell you, unsurprisingly there is no part of our brain called The Love Lobe, rather through a rather more methodical cocktail of chemicals our brain entices us to fall in love for reproductive means. As writer W. Somerset Maugham writes in 1949, love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species- ouch and indeed I stumbled across a successful experiment online that broke Love down into three simple scientific steps (two of their three participating couples went on to get married).
The science of love goes as thus, when Juliet felt that rush of stabbing love the first time she saw Romeo across the crowded room of the Capulet ballroom, it was no doubt down to a chemical kinsmen named Dopamine, working in the same way as cocaine, it releases a pleasure endorphin triggered by the sight of your beloved. Come Act 3, Serotonin creeps in and in the same way as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, makes it nie on impossible to think of anything or anyone but that person. “O Romeo, Romeo, where for art thou Romeo?” By Act 5 the release of Vasopressin during Act 4, a bonding hormone following sex, is entirely pointless as the star cross’d lover’s destiny has been tragically cut short.
Critics of the famed Shakespearean play have condemned the greatest love story of all time as something of a quixotic fraud. Norman Holland, erstwhile critic and Shakespearean devotee claims the story is “nothing more than Romeo’s own wish-fulfilling fantasy.” Indeed, I have vivid recollections of my own Literature teacher slamming the supposed amorous intentions of the play with damning realism, demeaning Romeo as a randy vagabond dallying with a relative minor in the nonplussed twelve year old that is Juliet. “Now is this love?” he called to a rather despondent class. As much as we just adore falling into the pages of a love-story, continues Holland, we shouldn’t expect to find similar breath-taking romances in the real world. “We have to acknowledge that a dramatic character is not like a human being with the same mental processes as its author,” he says.
Western culture has a romanticised view of relationships hence our doleful remarks at the almost business-like way in which our Islamic counterparts are ‘arranged’ their marriage, following the age-old reasoning: ‘But what about love?’ According to the LoveGeist report 95% of the singletons want a relationship, but significantly fewer desire marriage. Has romanticised culturalism led to a generation seeking romance and love rather than long-term commitment? Argues Dr. Helen Fisher, world-renowned New York based biological anthropologist, “Culture sculpts these feelings of love- it gives us energy; makes us feel optimistic, elated, enthusiastic. Why not romance? What Hollywood is doing is merely piggybacking a uniting force that has been around for millions of years; it is impossible for any one person not to feel ‘love’. Legal statements aside romance and love are animal instincts and what people want are exciting relationships, something marriage supposedly contravenes.”
But here is where our argument comes unstuck because whilst we have cultural proof of our own love of love and so enamoured are we with the very idea of love, to admit so is seen as some kind of social blip. To admit to liking someone is seen as soppy and effeminate and the ‘I Love You’ of our grandparents’ generation have been replaced with no-strings casual sex; a rose with a Facebook Poke and The King and I with Heidi and Spender Pratt. There does seem a contradiction in the cultural myth that we do indeed love to love. Is the L-word on the decline, destined to die out on the waves of the digital age?
Continues Helen, “Contrary to belief, romantic love is very primitive; we have proof of love poetry from Ancient Greeks, China, Rome, it has transcended time because it is an instinctive brain system that has lasted and will continue to last for millions of years. We need to feel a certain romance to focus on the mating process, without it you would never be able to dedicate your time to another human being.”
So, is love the great cultural myth of our time, a science promoted to some social obligation? In the words of my grandmother, “All I know is, I’ve been in love with my husband for fifty long years and science or no science that’s all that counts.”
Yeah, I know, just call me Carrie Bradshaw.
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